Do you know that adults who spend an average of six hours a day in front of the TV will reduce their life expectancy by just less than 5 years, compared to someone who does not watch TV?
These days many of us live a sedentary lifestyle, for many and varied reasons, including working at a computer desk, this has a dramatic impact on health. When you sit, your head and shoulders drop forward, and your hip flexors and abdomen shorten. This misalignment is a major cause of chronic pains and can led to many common healthy problems in our society such as: obesity, diabetes, heart disease, osteoporosis and muscle wasting.
The real problem is not about sitting or standing, which it does affect, but the importance of the change in posture, which is good news since there are virtually unlimited opportunities for movement throughout the day, so the key isn’t in excess gym time to recover the sitting hours, in fact you should aim for a constant, natural low-intensity non-exercise movement that uses the gravity vector throughout the day.
This can be done in many ways such as housecleaning, stirring a pot of pasta sauce, rolling dough, gardening, hanging clothes to dry, dancing, whatever you can do that makes you move constantly. Reintroduce the opportunity for movement. “The less you move, the less you use gravity, and gravity, it turns out, is your lifeline”
Sitting for extended periods is not the only thing that can cause these problems, adopting any posture for long periods of times can also slow down your circulatory system. So, what to do if we have a fulltime desk job?
The secret is in learning how to hinge effectively and how your hamstrings, lower back, and gluts are designed to work and stretch together.
There are many exercises you can try presented in the following video: “The Founder,” which helps reinforce proper movement while strengthening the entire back of your body.
